"The Duchess of Langeais," an adaptation of the Balzac novel, is an intelligent, well-made costume drama from a star director, Jacques Rivette. If you know Rivette's other movies, picture something like his Joan of Arc film, "Joan the Maid," and you'll have a good idea of what to expect in terms of method. If you don't know Rivette, prepare yourself for an encounter with a style that seems almost an anti-style, and with a director whose approach to the past is to strip away all mythology, romanticism and preconception and just present life as people lived it.

No one else directs movies the way Rivette does. In a Rivette film, if someone walks across a room, you hear the creak of the wooden floor, because wooden floors, after all, do creak. Fireplaces aren't silent, either. They crackle under scenes and make unexpected popping sounds. Of course, there are grand balls, as in every other 19th century tale of the upper classes. But here, unlike in other movies, the music is quieter, because they didn't have amplifiers back then.

Moreover, whenever someone says, "Let's go into the next room," Rivette doesn't cut quickly to something arbitrary and then cut back to show the people already settled in the next room. No, he shows them getting up and moving, and he keeps the camera running until they get there.

In the hands of another director, such an approach would be disastrous. It would be boring, first of all, and the style would become an affectation. But Rivette is never boring. He has a world inside his head, not just a film. So when those people walk from one room to another, Rivette uses the time to show interesting little details - characters entering and leaving, bits that give the flavor of the period and a sense of the atmosphere. There's nothing affected here, just an adherence to truth, so that a scene on the beach comes with the sound of seagulls - loud seagulls - because they had seagulls then, too.

In such ways, Rivette reminds his audience that, though his movie may be taking place in a different historical period, it's also taking place in the physical world that we all know. The result is that we become more observant of the things we should be noticing about the period: the social customs, the clothing, the technology, the mechanics of daily life. Rivette's approach has the effect of forcing the actors to be truthful as well. Against this stripped-down background, anything phony would not only fall flat but would become funny. And with just a few false moves, the film could collapse.

Fortunately, there are no false moves in the performances of either Jeanne Balibar, as the duchess, or Guillaume Depardieu, as a successful general who finds himself a fish out of water in early 19th century French society. The duchess and the general meet at a party and are immediately attracted to each other in passionate, life-changing ways that could enrich their lives forever. But as they come from different worlds, they soon develop what Strother Martin once called a "failure to communicate." He courts her, and she treats him as a coquette would, according to the tenets of society. Meanwhile, he's too sincere and straightforward to understand these unspoken rules - and too much a tough guy to play by them for long.

Both actors are superb in delineating their slow progress from autonomous entities to people driven to extremes by tortured love. Guillaume Depardieu looks so much like his father that for a time I thought it was Gerard, newly slimmed down and with a face-lift. He has his father's stature and swagger, though he seems to lack some of his dad's buoyant love of existence. Then again, it could be the role. Balibar conveys the helplessness of a woman realizing that everything she knows is useless in the face of two forces, the general and her own passions.

The movie's satisfactions are subtle, but they run deep, and there are many. Point to almost anything, and there's some inventive element, some refusal to abide by cliche. For example, the treatment of society. We always hear how boring society was, all those parties, balls and dinners, how awful, and yet in the movies it always seems like fun. Only Rivette, in this film, takes the time to make these balls as dull and monotonous as they must have been, so that prospect of the poor duchess having attend such functions becomes unbearable.

We realize that for women of the duchess' standing, this society stuff had nothing to do with fun. This was a job.